With Series XII very nearly upon us, generally it’s a safe bet that if we are posting news it’ll be related to those new episodes. However, hidden away in the mail pages of the latest Big Finish magazine is something worthy of comment, if only as it’s a question that tends to often come in in Q&As with the cast.
For those of you unfamiliar with Big Finish, they have been creating a whole host of audio plays since the late nineties, and continue to this day producing a genuinely staggering amount of high quality work. Mostly these related to Doctor Who, but they also deal with several other properties that include the likes of Blakes 7, The Prisoner and The Avengers.
We had previously believed that Big Finish were interested in adding Red Dwarf to their roster. Previously, their annual surveys had asked what ranges their listeners would be interested in hearing in the future, and Red Dwarf was offered as one of the multiple choice answers. However, in the latest issue of their Vortex magazine, voice of the Daleks and Big Finsh executive producer Nicholas Briggs has gone some way to confirm this.
So there you have it, for those that have pondered on the prospect of Red Dwarf audios previously, it does seem that it is quite unlikely.
However in all honesty, this really is only logical. With a new series about to air after the last two only having been recorded in the last couple of years, the attention is quite rightly on the TV show rather than anything like this. Realistically this is really the way we of course would want it too. While their Doctor Who range continues alongside the TV show, it also has multiple actors and writers having worked on the show across it’s long history, while Red Dwarf is now quite firmly written by Doug alone with a core cast of the same four actors.
That’s not to say it’s not something we’d ever want to see of course. Big Finish has a whole variety of different types of audios, including full cast plays to narrated stories with sound effects that are not that far removed from the storyboard versions of Bodysnatcher and Identity Within, or indeed the Radio Show versions of the first two novels. In many respects, it’s one comedy show that could naturally lend itself to this format and still remain fairly recognisable.
If we ever reached a point where there was a will from Doug and the cast to do more Red Dwarf but a television series was no an option, it’s certainly one option that we’d like to consider could be an option, but it certainly shouldn’t come as any surprise that it’s not something currently being looked at.
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